


a flame-red ribbon

by arriviste



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Canon Era, Canonical Character Death, F/M, Female-Centric, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-20
Updated: 2014-08-20
Packaged: 2018-02-13 23:20:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,766
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2169093
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arriviste/pseuds/arriviste
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What a strange thing the sisterhood of women after battle is; an echo of the brotherhood of men during it, one following the other as night follows day.</p>
            </blockquote>





	a flame-red ribbon

**Author's Note:**

> La Bruyère: _Les femmes sont extrêmes, elles sont meilleures ou pires que les hommes —_  
> 

**(juin 1832)**

It’s a picture Musichetta will never forget: the blood on the stone, the blood on her hands. The blood has had a night and a day to dry, but the women use cold water and lye, and it flows fresh and red again.

It settles between the cobblestones, it settles in the lines of her hands and under her nails.

She scrubs. The blood makes its wasted way into the gutter. She scrubs, and her knuckles grow pink and raw, but they don't bleed. She scrubs, and the lye stings her eyes, but she doesn’t cry.

 

**(avril 1833)**

She doesn’t cry when the child does. It wakes her from sleep; not so much the fretful noise, weak as a sick cat, but the answering rush of wetness from her breasts. Her body has become a leaking vessel. A trailing, straggling sentence without a period.

Anne-Claude stirs in the bed behind her. “Are you going to her?”

Musichetta doesn't answer. Under her nightdress she still has the shape of a woman in term. It will go, the midwife told her. Suckle the child and it will go faster, this phantom curve of belly that matches the phantom father who isn’t there.

Behind her the soft noise of Anne-Claude putting back the blankets and getting out of bed is a gentle reproach. Musichetta is already sick of nursing the child, sick of being so weary, and so sick, so very sick of being angry.

She closes her eyes and hears Anne-Claude at the cradle, the changed noise the child makes as Anne-Claude lifts it and sets it against her shoulder; then the vibrating sound of the child’s cries, joggled out of it by Anne-Claude’s knowing hands.

Anne-Claude walks back and forth, her voice a low murmur set against its quietened howl. Her feet make dry, shuffling sounds against the floorboards. The faint hint of dawn slowly begins to show under the shutters: if they don’t get the child to sleep before the carts start moving in the street below, it will scream all through the morning.

“Here,” Anne-Claude whispers at last, folding back the blankets and helping Musichetta to rise a little against her pillows. It hurt more now to deny the child than to take it up. She opens her nightdress and it turns its face into her like a close-eyed kitten, seeking warmth. When it finds what it’s searching for, the rootling mouth becomes cruel.

The milk lets down easily, unlike the tears she still has not shed. She has no control over it. It’s a constant wonder to Musichetta every time she puts the child to her breast that the small face doesn’t screw up in horror at the bitterness that must rush out from her with the milk; the salt and the brine. 

 

**(janvier 1827)**

In Lyon she has few options: help her mother at home, help her father in the shop. Go to work in a factory. Marry. She can write moderately well, and read better, but she has to make her living with a needle, not a pen. Paris is where life happens. Paris is where men write poetry and women make their fortunes and dance and go to plays and riot in the streets. Paris is where they live. 

Paris offers more than Lyon. Paris offers everything. 

In Paris seamstresses can earn from fifty centimes to two francs a day. Four to six francs for the very best dressmakers. In Lyon and in the Nord, the only women who make that much work as weavers and warpers, or on their backs. 

She makes lace. She sews. She changes her name to something Romantic. She rents a sixth-floor garret on the Left Bank with a milliner who seems respectable and has enough customers to offer Musichetta the work she doesn’t care for. 

She reads. Placards on the streets that read ‘No more lords’ and ‘War against tyrants and despots’, ‘Down with serfdom’; ‘Long live the liberals, the Charter, and the King.’ 

In chalk on the side of a bridge, before the police can wash it away: _En t'ait fait sacre, tu sera massacre._

She reads papers and pamphlets. There’s a periodical that seems to change its name like it has a guilty secret to hide. It makes laying hands on it difficult. At first it’s called _La Femme Libre._ Then, _La Femme Libre: Apostolat Des Femmes._ That lasts a few issues. Then it becomes _La Femme de L’Avenirs_ , with _La Femme Libre_ in very small typeface, almost obscured by the scrollwork of the letterhead. The next issue that disappears entirely, and it becomes _La Femme Nouvelle: Apostolat Des Femmes._

Musichetta can follow the logic. There’s something not quite respectable about being a free woman in Paris. 

She reads Alfred de Vigny’s _.Poèmes_ and the novels of Germaine du Stael. At the theatre she goes to see Tartuffe and Ali Baba. She sews and makes lace and dreams of Italy and Arabia and flying carpets. 

It’s three months before Musichetta discovers that her milliner has a lover and fucks him in both narrow beds whenever he wants her, which seems to be whenever Musichetta is out. Soon it becomes whenever she’s home. She finds new lodgings when the milliner’s lover suggests she join them. 

 

**(septembre 1828)**

She meets Joly late in 1828. She’s not the innocent she was when she first came to Paris, except in that most prescriptive of senses. She’s had flirtations. A would-be lawyer, who hoped to talk his way into her bed. A sweet and consumptive would-be playwright, who read her badly-metred manuscripts and never tried to even kiss her hand. A draper who wants to marry her, and isn’t shy about making his wishes known, but Musichetta isn’t ready yet to give up youth and freedom for haberdashery and bolts of poplin. 

Joly meets her by chance in the Palais-Royal, where she’s walking with a friend. 

“That young man is staring at you,” the friend whispers.

“Let him stare,” Musichetta says calmly. She doesn’t mind being stared at, as long as she isn’t ogled. Her glossy dark hair is pinned up with particular care today, in bunches of ringlets at each ear. Her grey muslin is particularly pretty, and edged with red ribbon. Her gloves are new, and still miraculously unstained with ink.

The young man watches them as they progress down one avenue, stopping to admire a flower-stall or a trinket-seller. He pauses when they pause, and resumes his pace when they walk on. His expression is peculiarly fixed.

“He looks grotesquely in love. Does he mean to approach us, or is he shy?”

“Shy, I think,” Musichetta says, turning her eyes to a book-seller’s stand. She isn’t interested in shy. Her playwright has exhausted her tolerance for bashfulness.

“Excuse me, mademoiselles,” the young man says, a moment later, and swallows. His throat moves, brown against his white collar and black stock. His hair is brown too, a medium drab fawn that would never catch a woman’s eye on a summer promenade in the park. His features, when not arranged in that fatuous study, are similarly pleasant and unexceptionable. His waistcoat is the only part of his person that stands out; an eye-catching horror in patterned blue and red and green, brilliant against his dark blue coat. 

“Are we perhaps in your way?” Musichetta asks. Her friend giggles. 

“Yes – I mean, no,” he contradicts himself. She’s not surprised by his awkwardness. Young men of considerably more address have faltered when she stares at them. He rallies, which does surprise her. “That is – I saw you were looking at a volume of verse by de Lamartine – and I wanted to inquire – Do you care for it?”

“ _Les Nouvelles Méditations_?”

“Yes; that’s the volume.”

“I haven’t had the opportunity to read it,” Musichetta says. She refrains from mentioning that if she had, she would not be studying it at a bookseller’s. “ _Méditations poétiques_ , however – I enjoyed it.”

“And his politics?” 

“I read him for his poetry, not his politics.” The young man looks chastened. She softens again. “I don’t care for his politics particularly.”

“Nor me.” He smiles. 

It’s a charming smile. It alters his countenance remarkably. Musichetta smiles back, despite herself, and he plucks the book from her hand. 

“May I make a gift of this to you, and allow you to become better acquainted with its contents?”

“And with yourself?”

He gurgles with laughter. “Yes, indeed! You’ve found me out; that was my objective in offering.” 

His eyes are also a quite ordinary brown, but on close examination, have green and gold depths. She doesn’t even know his name. 

“Very well,” Musichetta hears herself say.

Over the next few weeks and months, she discovers that his name is Joly; or so his friends call him, with an exaggerated roll of the second consonant. It suits him. He’s a medical student. He takes her pulse with his fingertips, holding her wrist so gently she can barely feel his touch. He laughs, often. His face is more smiles than not; that particularly nervous expression only reappears when he asks permission to walk with her through the streets, or to escort her to the theatre, or to supper. He steals kisses with an adroitness that contradicts the callow way he goggled at her across the busy avenue.

“You took my brains and breath away together,” he defends himself when she says this. Then his face grows abruptly quizzical. “I wonder – No, it couldn’t be a weakening of the brain; the occasion was too isolated. If there were more such moments where I lost possession of myself – I must be vigilant. Senility is an old man’s disease, but it’s been known to attack the young. I must remember to take care.” 

“But if you’re going senile, how will you remember?”

“I’ll write a note to myself,” Joly decides. His grin acknowledges the absurdity but nevertheless insists upon obeying it. “Only lend me your pen, and I’ll do so immediately –”

 

**(juilliet 1832)**

After the day and the night and the day and the night of fire and gunpowder in the streets, she goes back to work. Men live and men die for words and names and incremental changes in government, but single women must work. She wears a torn dress put away for mending because the hem of her usual skirt is still wet and filthy, dragged with a tideline of old blood. If she put it on it would cling and slap around her ankles.

She’s been working at the print shop since she left the milliner’s lodgings. She doesn’t work in the print room. Her arms are not considered strong enough to crank the cast-iron press, that’s for men. Her fingers are not small enough to be tasked with smoothing out the printing blankets a moment before the lithographic plates go under the rolling wheel, and she doesn’t grudge it. She doesn’t need the pulverised fingers and stiff joints of the print boys. Sometimes she’s pressed into service and ends up with printers’ ink on her hands, black and oily, harder to remove than the red smudges of corrective crayon.

Her job is to sew seams and spines into collections of paper, turning them from the loose leafs that could be turned into a disaster by a breath of air into cohesive narratives, things that hold together. She sews miscellany into semblance all day, and by the end of it her fingertips are raw with pricked skin and welling beads of blood where her needle has slipped.

The next day she does it again. As July turns into August, she sews spines, focusing on each small and precise stitch as though by doing so she can ignore the sour taste on the back of her tongue in the morning.

At last, in despair, she writes to her mother. Musichetta came to Paris to work, and to be free; it is galling to be proved just another tired woman in a long line of them, caught in the same old trap.

 

**(aout 1833)**

The child weans earlier than expected. Her breasts turn as hard as stone, and burn, and ache.

When men and women write secret messages of love and war and treason, they dip their pens in milk, and hope their recipient knows to hold the letter up to a candle so that the words show up in scorched brown. Nursing the child made Musichetta like she was writing in white ink, shaping traceless words to no one. (The dead). Was this the work she had been made for? Is this the biological conclusion to her life?

Weaning is therefore both a relief and a further ache. She feels like her own self again, bounded within her skin, but she’s no longer needed. Less necessary. The child would do as well with Anne-Claude as with her. 

Better, possibly. Musichetta feels like she’s drowning whenever she looks at it. Passionate love and despair and resentment twist together in an eddy, a whirlpool, a sucking hole that demands all of her and will pull her down and down and down if she lets it catch her.

 

**(fevrier 1829)**

Joly never speaks of marriage to Musichetta, and she never asks. Men do not marry their mistresses. He’s a medical student now, not too far beyond her; but in a few years he will be a doctor. When he has his degree and sets up his practice, he will marry the daughter of a lawyer or a doctor or some other wealthy bourgeois. She is the daughter of a market gardener. She will marry an artisan. If she's lucky, her artisan will own a print shop, or sell books.

They speak of love, instead.

“You disdain me,” Joly says, looking distraught. It's the same look he wears when he thinks he has cholera. “It is unkind of you. All I want is a kiss, or the touch of your hand, and you won't speak to me.”

It’s a pretence between them, that she can break him with a kiss, or with an averted face. Sometimes it feels true. They are in Paris and the streets are full of music and screaming and living and dying, and Musichetta is nineteen and knows that she is beautiful. It will go, her mother told her, everything goes; but right now she’s lovely and she’s young and men cry out when she passes in the street. Her black hair falls past her waist when she unpins it. Her eyes are black, too, and her skin is white, and when she bites her lips they're red. Ardent students catch her skirts when she walks by and cry Lilith, _lamia,_ Philinnon.

Joly is not the most poetic or the best dancer or the most wealthy giver of gifts, but he’s sincere, and that _is_ a gift. She likes the way he combs his hair, and the light in his eyes, and the way they crinkle at the corners. The seriousness his face takes on when he studies. The careful diagnostic touches of his fingers.

At the moment she’s pretending to be furious with him about something trivial. Really, she's afraid. She wants to be Romantic, to live and love as freely as the milliner-girl who shared her lodging, the waitresses at the cafe down the street, the factory-girls painting enamel on tin every day. The last step is hard. The ultimate favour, they call it. Something to be bestowed on a man. A city falling to siege. 

The last time Musichetta was alone with Joly, on his knee, he tugged her bodice down and touched her breasts through her chemise. That was an intimacy already allowed, already anticipated. What was not was Joly putting his mouth to the thin cloth and suckling them through the linen. When she went stiff and pushed him away he apologised.

Now he thinks she's sulking when she won't see him. She's trying to think.

Musichetta knows that some girls like sex, what they do with men in the dark in their rooms, what whores do up against the walls of alleyways like dogs. Her mother has always implied there was nothing for women in it, but she wants him, and she thinks she might like it.

 

**(juin 1832)**

The crowd of women who gather together to claim and wash the dead are a strange group. Mothers, sisters, wives and mistresses. Women who simply saw or heard them die. Women of the neighbourhood who simply want their pavements to be clean.

It’s always women, in the end.

Perhaps a mistress has no place among them, but Musichetta is there anyway. The distinctions of class don’t seem to matter when their men are all arranged in a line, an alleyway their makeshift morgue. Most of them are strangers to her; Joly had never wanted his friends to meet her. Bossuet had been the exception. She’d thought that perhaps he was ashamed of her, or distrusted her constancy, but Bossuet had been the one to explain it to her.

The big man with the sword slash across his belly, she met him once. She can’t remember his name. A woman is on her knees beside him. She remembers another not from Joly introducing him, but from the print shop; a sweet shy boy, who hadn’t been able to speak to her about the proper arrangement of his poetry without blushing, only to the printer. Why had they used so many bullets on him?

She sees one of the bourgeois women, middle-aged, clipping a guinea-gold curl from the head of the leader; the one who had fallen back through the window and hung there like a cruciform knocked from a church wall.

Musichetta takes nothing from the bodies. It would upset Joly to go in pieces into the ground. She can imagine him walking through the streets, faded, his head tilted in half-confusion, not quite sure what he's lacking –

Bossuet, of course, has no hair to clip.

“They died together,” the mother of the hanging angel says, and clips another curl. It is tucked carefully into the breast pocket of the dead man in bottle-green at his side like a badge of honour.

Musichetta smoothes the wrinkles from Joly's shirt for the last time, and adjusts Bossuet's cravat. He would be so upset at the state of it. She cannot match the folds he took such care over. She hesitates a moment, then puts their hands together. The death cart will separate them again, but right now –

She takes nothing: later she regrets it.

 

**(mars 1829)**

She meets Bossuet in March the next year. 

It would be a lie to say Joly introduces him to her. It happens by a happy accident on an evening when she has an assignation with Joly in his own lodgings. Joly has invited her to dine – with the unsaid _and to stay_ understood – but they haven’t eaten yet, despite the fact that the fire is burning in the grate and there’s an excellent meal for two ordered from a nearby café on the table. 

Rather, as soon as he sees her he has to kiss her, and then she has to kiss him back.

They haven’t got beyond the proper exchange of kiss for kiss for kiss, although her hair has come down in around her neck and shoulders, and Joly has lost his cravat. 

The door flies open.

“I left my umbrella behind,” someone says apologetically. “Oh, hallo, who’s this? Mademoiselle, my compliments! Or perhaps I should make mine to you, Joly – no?”

“No,” Joly says, face red. Musichetta wonders whether she should suggest the possibility of apoplexy to him, but decides, on balance, not to. “Lesgles, I did ask you to stay away this evening.”

“Jolllly, I did tell you that I left my umbrella behind,” this Lesgles says, with such a droll apologetic way of drawing out the word that Musichetta wants to laugh. She starts pinning up her hair instead. “I’m sorry to have disturbed your tête-à-tête – really, you know, you only needed to say.”

“I did say.”

“Pardon; you said you needed to brush up on your anatomy text.” A pause. “Oh.”

“Brush up on your anatomy text?” Musichetta asks, and raises her voice, delicately, and her eyebrows. 

Joly goes redder. “Er – My dear, have I introduced you to my good friend?” He knows he hasn’t. He rushes on. “This is Lesgles, or as we call him, L’Aigle – Bossuet, when we mean to be funny.”

“Mean; yet succeed? A different question,” Lesgles-Bossuet muses, sotto voce.

“The best of good fellows,” Joly continues, with a frown for the interruption. “That is to say, usually. Also the unluckiest. He’s rooming with me at the moment – and yet you’d think that a straightforward request to make himself absent for an evening wouldn’t be too difficult to carry out.”

“It wouldn’t have been, if you’d been straightforward about it,” Bossuet says. “Nevertheless – the accident is a fortunate one, which has the distinction of uniqueness in my experience. Mam’selle – I’ve heard your name, pressed between sad sighs of the most melancholy longing, or whispered in flights of rapture that brought our winged-one almost off the floor in his transcendence. I thought I would never have the honour of making your acquaintance!”

He looks to be about Joly’s age, or perhaps a year older. His dress is even more conspicuous; the pattern of his waistcoat bolder and more terrible. His top-hat has seen better days, and unless it conceals a strangely-placed patch of hair, in the opposite configuration to a priestly tonsure, he’s already as bald as a nut. But the features are pleasant, and the laugh contagious, and his mouth wears its smile like an old friend.

Bossuet continues, “Oh, this mutton is from the café with the blue door! I couldn’t fail to recognise their way of cutting it. Too thin, and see how the blood runs out? At the Corinthe, at least, it may be tough as leather but _la vieille_ cuts her slabs with a generous hand. One could offer an observation on the difference between wives and widows, but the conclusion draws itself. These beans – were they served _lardons_? Otherwise – oh, it makes no particular difference, but it’s a shame. One expects the smack of salt, the taste of butter and bacon; and all one gets is water. I could make the recipe up out of my head. _L’haricots_ , many; onions, some; a pinch of salt, a touch of pepper – and butter, a great deal of it, and some fat, for flavour. Such is the way we serve beans in Meaux.”

He punctuates his lecture by helping himself to the mutton, and Joly gives her a faintly despairing look and says, “This is why I didn’t introduce you; a man is judged by those he calls friends.”

“I resent,” Bossuet says, adding a soupcon of beans, plain, to his plate, “that remark. I resent it greatly.”

Musichetta has wondered why Joly doesn’t introduce her to his friends, and she doesn’t think it’s due to their objectionable characters, whatever Joly contends in the next bout of back-and-forth. She’s a grisette, yes, and a mistress – but he’s a student, not some married bourgeois, and he has no reason to be ashamed of her before his friends, who doubtless keep their own women and are kept by them, in the long habit of students and shop-girls in Paris. The temporary poverty of one is alleviated by the temporary prosperity of the other: in this time before taking up their responsibilities and settling into the defined patterns of their lives, they are both free, and young, and almost, perhaps, equal.

Bossuet is a fixture after that. “He’s impossible,” Joly complains, but there’s no real concern in his voice. The damage is done. He makes no effort to discourage a further association. Bossuet shares his rooms, and his supper, and makes a chatty and sociable third in conversation at the dinner-table, at the breakfast-tabe, during strolls in the gardens, and cups of chocolate taken in the mid-morning.

His presence is strangely not intrusive.

There’s an ease to Joly in Bossuet’s company that she’s never seen in Joly alone. Alone, Joly is sometimes funny, or passionate, or worried; always on the edge of anxious. He stammers over his speech when she looks at him a certain way. He tries to watch his words, and prepares them with care, even if he later forgets his script. In Bossuet’s company he is assured, his stops and starts plastered over and filled by the other. He is half of a pair, a practised act so long-established that it’s second nature. Bossuet adds salt and pepper and the necessary flavour to the main course. 

“You’re always mentioning people I’ve never met,” Musichetta says, when Joly is attending a lecture. “Does Joly have so many other friends?”

“He’s a lovable sort; one almost forgives him the unfortunate habit of examining his tongue during meal-times.”

“He’s never offered to introduce me to them.”

“A hit! What am I, if not his friend?”

He doesn’t count. He could be Joly’s brother. He could be his twin. “An accident,” Musichetta says. Bossuet is fond of words. They spill out of him in a constant fountain. He’s one of those people whose conversation refreshes its listeners and gladdens their spirits, rather than drawing from their resources. Sometimes a straight question needs a straight answer. “I mean in his general way of life – he keeps me apart. Am I an embarrassment?” 

Her bluntness discomposes both of them. Bossuet coughs, and Musichetta returns to her sewing. She’s half-finished the edging on her cap when Bossuet clears his throat.

“Ah,” he says. He steeples his fingertips. “Well. That is to say – No.”

“No?”

“Joly can be peculiar,” Bossuet says, as though confiding a great secret. “I wondered, before I made your acquaintance – But it’s not because you bring a blush to his cheeks. No. We have some excellent friends, you know. Fire-eaters, fire-breathers; men with machinery in their heads and the tongues of angels. Courfeyrac could charm a panther – and Bahorel perform the feat of Hercules in taking the globe on his shoulders. Our Prouvaire writes poetry; our Enjolras –! I can’t describe him to you. Enjolras has to be met in the flesh to be understood. A good man, yes – but that fails to describe his particular concatenation of virtues. Virtue – that sounds priggish, and he’s not that. Hard? Yes – but that fails to account for the kindness in his nature.”

“Do you mean that Joly’s worried that one of them will like me too much?” A reassuring thought.

An irritating one.

“Well, not precisely,” Bossuet says, cavilling. “You simply must understand how things are between us all. One’s business is another’s; one’s dearest secrets, too. It’s not a bad thing. But I think – I only think – I suspect that Joly considers his connection with you too dear to share even with these dear friends.”

“And you?” Musichetta asks him, finding the hole in the lacework of this theory. “What are you, if not his friend?”

“I’m a special case,” Bossuet says, and smiles.

 

**(juin 1832)**

Joly has a cold. He is worried about taking a chill. “Enjolras wants us to attend the funeral tomorrow,” he says, and blows his nose. It is pink and looks raw. “I hab told him, I cannod stand in the rain jud to watch the hearse roll by. Id will go to my chest. Lamarque was a good man, and I dake off my hat to him, bud I prefer to do so indoors.”

Joly always complains inordinately when he is ill. Musichetta laughs at his stuffed nose and goes to work through the rain. When the print shop closes, she goes to Joly's lodging instead of her own. She expects him to be there, muffled in rugs and blankets in the armchair drawn close to the fire, with Bossuet hanging off its wing to jolly Joly from his gloom.

The room is empty. Somewhere in the distance, there is the sound of guns. 

 

**(septembre 1832)**

During the days the letter takes to reach her mother, and her mother's answer takes to reach Paris, whatever is inside her goes on growing, cell by dividing cell, on a string, in the dark.

She meets Anne-Claude in the street when she is on her way elsewhere. She hasn't seen the woman since that day on their knees on the cobblestones, trying to washing away a rising tide of blood. Such a meeting is difficult to forget.

“Chérie,” Anne-Claude says warmly, and embraces her while her arms are full of parcels. 

“How do you do?”

That last is said directly into her ear, and Musichetta says, “Well, I am well,” with her face pressed into the other woman's shoulder. She should resent so much familiarity from a near-stranger, but she doesn't. They shared that day, and that binds them together in blood and hoops of iron. What a strange thing the sisterhood of women after battle is; an echo of the brotherhood of men during it, one following the other as night follows day.

Anne-Claude releases her. “I’m glad to hear it.”

“And you?” 

“Oh, I do well enough.” Anne-Claude smiles, briefly. It suits her much more than the only look Musichetta has seen her wear. She must have smiled a lot once. Laughed. She peers more closely at Musichetta and the smile fades. “You look sick.”

Musichetta shrugs. Her face feels stiff. She knows she’s pale, and that she’s lost the colour in her lips and cheeks. Sometimes she thinks of the women who have thrown themselves into the Seine and washed to shore like mermaids, white and waxen and heavy with water. “I'm tired.”

“You're the colour of paper,” Anne-Claude says, and with further intimacy takes her chin in her fingers and turns her face back and forth. 

 

**(juillet 1832)**

Anne-Claude is a few years older than Musichetta, and earthier, although Musichetta comes from the countryside near Lyon and Anne-Claude was born within earshot of Saint-Denis. They meet once after that day on their knees, before they meet by chance again in the street. On that occasion they drink coffee and hot chocolate in one of the cafes in the Palais-Royal in assignation with each other and another girl who was with them that day. It’s awkward, and no one suggests repeating the experiment.

If Anne-Claude is older, with a red silk ribbon-cockade pinned above her breast and a lace and cotton fichu that fails in its modest purpose, Catherine is younger, sweet-faced and unformed. Her soft brown hair is parted neatly before being arranged into curls; her dress is dove-grey and so is her bonnet, and the only hint of backbone reveals itself in the glint of her eyes. On the day they washed the paving-stones, those eyes had been red with weeping. Her hands had been as red and roughened as theirs from the lye. They had been the same.

When they meet at the café, it is clear they are far apart. Musichetta has no friends in common with Anne-Claude, although Anne-Claude assures her that her man had known Joly, and so had she. Musichetta never sat among them at a wine-shop. Joly would never have wanted her exposed to his friends in their cups. She wonders if she might have made a friend of Anne-Claude earlier, if he had, and suspects not. Her humour is too different, her interests less literary. She follows the popular theatre and attends masked balls at the opera and is familiar with a dozen student clubs. If her Bahorel was her last lover, he was not her first.

Catherine is different again. She met with them only with difficulty, because her mother wouldn’t like it. Her lover was a medical student like Joly. Briefly Musichetta finds common ground with her in recalling their ghoulish pleasure in a new dissection-lecture, a gruesome and interesting complaint in a patient. It falters when it becomes clear that her knowledge of the body goes no deeper. She never held her lover in her arms, only at arm’s-length. She has a gold ring on her finger. “We were going to be married in the autumn,” she says, twisting it. Her hands are protected by lace mitts.

“He was never going to marry me,” Musichetta says. 

Anne-Claude says bravely, “What is marriage? Nothing but a beloved institution of the bourgeois; a conspiracy between Pope and King to bind us. The men of ’93 had the right idea. _À bas le mariage_!” 

 

**(janvier 1830)**

“It shouldn’t hurt,” Joly says, medically prescriptive. He looks distressed. Musichetta brushes a damp brown curl off his fretted brow and kisses the crinkle there. “That is, the first time – but after that, it’s meant to get better.”

She knows a little about science, from his talk. She says, “Well, the only way to determine the accuracy of that claim is to repeat the experiment,” and watches his face lighten. 

He’s right. It does get better, the more often they do it.

She’d do it anyway, whether it was good for her the way the cheap blue-covered pamphlet-books swear it can be, because she loves him, and she wants to give herself to him. She’d do it for the sake of holding him in her arms afterwards and having him lay his head on her chest, counting out her heartbeats.

But it’s good in its own right, soon, and then more than good. She’s wild early that summer, and happy, and barefoot when she wants to be. She wears silk flowers in her hair. She hems her handkerchiefs with red ribbons. She’s young, and in love, and in Paris. 

Joly laughs and kisses her hands and feet, swearing eternal love and making ridiculous promises of devotion, babbling sweet stupidities. He tells her that her very toes drive him wild. 

She feels more alive when he’s touching her, like the electricity he talks about is running through her veins. He has a funny brass and leather listening-tube for the heart, but it doesn’t seem like he should need one when his hands are so sure. 

“Ah, but we are modern men of medicine now,” Joly says. “The bedside manner has changed. I can hear a certain amount by placing ear to chest – so.” His hair is damp between her breasts. “Your heart sounds strong – regular – Ah, it sped up for a moment there.”

“Your ear lies to you.”

“No such thing! Immediate auscultation doesn’t lie – but the problem is that it doesn’t listen closely enough to the secret language of the heart.” Joly lifts his chin and smiles at her. As always, it’s unfairly devastating. “Right now it tells me that you’re healthy, and young, and recently engaged in some form of exertion.” 

She pinches him, and he rolls off her, still amused. 

He doesn’t go far. A leaf of paper, left loosely on his desk, is seized, rolled into a cylinder, and comes back to bed with him. 

“See,” Joly says. “It’s rough enough, but de Laennac’s first stethoscope was no better. A simple trick, but if I put this to your breast – _so_ – ”  
The amusement leaves his face as he listens, and the slightly rapt look he wears when he’s reading or writing or engrossed in something replaces it. He’s her lover, naked in her bed, but for a moment he’s forgotten both facts. 

“Mediate auscultation,” he says, still abstracted. “ _De l’auscultation mediate, ou traité du diagnostic des maladies des poumons et du Cœur_ – but I’m doing this the wrong way around." He curls her fingers around the paper. "Listen."

It’s a tool. Most men would rather hand her a broom, or put her hand to something else entirely. She’s heard his heart beating before, beneath her cheek. It’s louder through the paper even though it’s further away. She’s heard of shells that, held to the ear, sing the sound of the sea. Joly’s heart speaks to her in the same way, the strong and steady pulse more immediate than the other sounds in the small room. 

 

**(janvier 1833)**

It’s one of the few serious arguments she has with him. The rest are only sulks, and sink away in memory without leaving a stain. He has sworn a vow, he tells her. A physician must. It’s tradition. It’s for the patient’s sake, not some Popish prudery. He’s sorry for her friend, but the business is a bloody one, and dangerous, and morally uncertain. Besides, he has no training in obstetrics.

He’s not here to help her now, but she’s not sure he would if he was. He would care for her, she knows; he’s not faithless. He wasn’t faithless. Bu t he’s not here.

Her mother says, come home. Without it. Anne-Claude frowns when Musichetta tells her this. She’s thinking. 

A few days later: We will be sisters, she says. This is what we will say. You are my widowed sister, come to stay with me. I’ll help you when the baby comes. When Musichetta's mouth trembles, she touches her chin. “It is true, isn't it?”

“Yes,” Musichetta says, and puts her hand over hers. 

She gives up her print work in the Ile-de-Cité where she’s known, and known to have had no husband. Anne-Claude's virtuous married sister works in a shop somewhere, so Musichetta works in a shop selling gloves until her pregnancy is advanced enough that she can no longer flirt young men into buying unnecessary accessories. One or two become more interested, not less.

(“You’ve heard what they say about women in pig, haven’t you?” another shop-girl says. “Oh, they don’t stay around long, but while it lasts–! It’s a sure way to avoid entanglements – you can’t get her pregnant _twice_.”)

All she wants is a moment to weep and weep: but no one will let her. She feels stiff with grief. Lot's wife, a pillar of salt from tears unshed. At night, in the dark, perhaps she could – but instead she lies awake in Anne-Claude’s bed, in Anne-Claude’s room, listening to her breathe in the warm stuffy dark. A comfort. A suffocation.

Anne-Claude’s friends and neighbours accept her as the virtuous sister Anne-Claude’s made mention of before. They offer sympathy for her pretended loss that seems to make the salt crust thicker. She’s not salt, she’s stone. In water she would sink as quickly and surely as the ancient statues they sometimes fish up in the Marseille harbour from the days of aquifers and Roman roads.

“You’re literary,” Anne-Claude observes. “Why not use that? There are children in the neighbourhood that could use the education; it will be good practice for teaching your own little one.” 

The suggestion makes Musichetta unhappy, without being sure precisely why. She’s not particularly interested in children, but she’s interested in education. Perhaps that’s what unsettles her – she hasn’t come to the end of what she wants to know herself. How can she teach others? 

 

**(juillet 1830)**

There’s fighting in the streets. Blood and fire and rounds of lead. The whole city throbs with it, with cries of _À bas le roi!_ All the slogans she’s seen scrawled on walls and scratched into tavern table-tops have been given breath, like a long-boiling pot bubbling over at last.

She doesn’t see or hear from Joly. Surely he wouldn’t – but he’s a student, and he first spoke to her of de Lamartine’s politics as well as his poetry. She doesn’t see Bossuet, but he sends her a message by a ragged child on the second day of fighting. _All’s well! The winged-one is making himself useful with the wounded, and your unlucky correspondent is avoiding the bullets. À bas le Bourbons!_

July is unbearable in an ordinary year. Anyone with two louis to rub together leaves the city for the countryside, and their king has done the same. He stays at Saint-Cloud while Paris foments, waiting for the smoke to clear. He has faith in the army. Musichetta has faith in Paris, in liberty and freedom and in the young men she knows, the feeling of change in the air.

They come home to her drunk on the same sentiment, stinking of sweat and sulphur. They’ve been sleeping in their clothes, and they haven’t exchanged them for fresh ones. Words fail her, and Joly hugs her waist and kisses her with his three-day beard rough against her cheek.

“You look like a pickpocket,” she tells him unsteadily, instead of _Thank God_ , or _How dare you_. Turning to Bossuet: “And you!”

“I sent word!” He throws his arms out in exculpation. Musichetta embraces him, without thinking. Then she kisses him, soundly, because he’s alive to be kissed. They both are.

He looks dazed when she’s done. Joly is laughing, propped tiredly against the door. “O L’Aigle; your face is a picture.” 

“My face is a fireplace,” Bossuet says, flushed with July and embarrassment. 

They both fall asleep almost before their boots are off. It’s the first time they’ve all shared the same bed, and it happens in exhaustion and innocence. Musichetta has lain awake too long the past few nights, and now she, too, can sleep.

 

**(avril 1833)**

Birth is worse than her mother told her. What is Musichetta flies apart, is torn apart, narrows down to nothing but the torturous passage of the child from her body. She is a city assailed by battering-ram; she is a voice crying out alone in darkness. She recites verse in broken strings. 

_Du sommeil de la mort tout prêt à s’endormir…_

No. 

_J’ai besoin faible enfant,_  
 _Qu’on veille à mon berceau._  
 _Et l’aigle peut, du moins,_  
 _A l’ombre de son aile, protéger le timide oiseau._

Worse. 

Worse. 

 

**(juin 1832)**

They share a bed many more times. It’s not something they discuss, then or later. Joly is her lover, and Bossuet his friend – hers, too. It feels like closing a circle, not opening one. 

The last time the three of them share a bed, Joly has a cold, and Bossuet finds this improbably amusing. “Say ‘I have a cold in the head, and I will spend the day in bed, and perhaps end up dead.”

“I hab a cold in de head,” Joly repeats obediently, “and I will spend de day in bed, and perhaps end up dead.” He blows his nose. “You missed your mark wid the lader pard, L’Aigle. Dey did nod trouble me.”

“ _Will_ you spend tomorrow in bed?” Musichetta asks, stroking his shoulder. She wishes she could spend it with him, but she’s needed in the printshop. Bossuet will keep him company, and do it charmingly, and she’ll come home to a barrage of bad jokes and cross-talk they’ve thought up and will have to try valiantly not to laugh at any of it. 

(“She’s sulking at us!” Bossuet will say, affronted. “She thinks it makes her mysterious, to freeze and scald us by turns.”

“ _La belle dame sans merci_ ,” Joly will answer, and make tragic eyes at her before he pulls a face so hideous she can’t keep her face stiff. Then she’ll laugh, unwillingly, and Bossuet will grin at both of them before suggesting some vulgar way to melt her cold heart, and somehow, they’ll end up trying it, the three of them.)

“Id depends,” Joly says. “I’ll see in de morning.”

 

**(novembre 1833)**

_La Femme Libre_ is calling itself _La Tribune des Femmes_ now. Musichetta buys a copy, and then another. Its articles are still all written by women. Women who are tired. Women who are angry. Women who think they could do as well or better than the men who squander their abilities, if they have them, and drink and gamble with their wages, and give their lives up in the streets in a welter of pointless blood too easily shed. They dislike Rousseau, who thought women’s power should lie in household duties and children and sewing, not in writing verses at their dressing tables surrounded by political pamphlets. They approve of Condorcet, if they hold him to be a little below Olympe de Gouges. They have no clear agenda. They are as earnest as before, but a little less respectable. They solicit articles and opinions from women outside their already-charmed circle. 

At first Musichetta has no intention of contributing. What do these women know about her life? They express a desire to understand, but they wouldn’t like what she had to say. Once upon a time she read Romantic novels and dreamed of being Delphine, Laura, Marie, and full of childlike wonder, ready to sacrifice all for love. She thought she might write something like that, one day. 

Now the words that issue from her have nothing to do with Romantic idealism, with passion and ingénues and melancholy tragedies. She’s had enough of that. 

What she writes, when she writes at last, is a stopped-howl of grief; a stormy stony rejection of unfairness. 

_Lorsque tous peuples s'agitent au nom de Liberté, et que le prolétaire réclame son affranchissement, nous, femmes, resterons-nous passives devant ce grand mouvement d’émancipation sociale qui s’opère sous nos yeux…_

It comes easily. It pours out of her like milk. Her hands flower with alien blue-black blossoms of ink, thinner and finer than the sticky oily tar used for printing pamphlets. The ink settles in the invisible lines on her hands, tracing a map of an impossible city with a thousand criss-crossing streets. In some places, it makes the pattern of paving-stones. 

 

**(janvier 1834)**

The child can take small steps now, but she prefers to hold onto the edges of furniture and rock in place, testing, before she dares more. In this, she is Musichetta's daughter. She has more hair, and the general resemblance to Lesgles is less pronounced. When her wobbling steps grow too ambitious, she ends on the floor on her rump. Her mouth works, fretful and indignant, and then she looks like Joly. 

Anne-Claude smiles her warm smile when the child makes her way haltingly across the room for the first time without falling. Her outstretched hands catch and clutch at Musichetta’s skirts. 

For a moment, stiff with surprise, she’s not sure whether to detach them or to take them in her inky own. 

Anne-Claude says, to the child, “Clever, ma jolie, aren't you?” 

The dangerous sinkhole of emotion pulls at Musichetta like her small daughter, whose mouth is open in a rictus of mirth, the three small teeth like sharp pearls. 

She must stand still. She is stone, she is stone. Her cheeks are wet. 

The tears, come at last, are a surprise.

**Author's Note:**

> \- I originally started this for the minimisfest, and ended up abandoning it due to RL exploding like a thousand Chinese firecrackers; it gave me the impetus to write something not E/R, though, and put a hard limit of 'Teen' on the sexual level.
> 
> \- It wasn't quite right for the opening quote, but I kept these words from Virginia Woolf's _A Room of One's Own_ at the top of the document when I was writing: "But by no possible means could middle-class women with nothing but brains and character at their command have taken part in any one of the great movements which, brought together, constitute the historian’s view of the past."


End file.
